Monterey Peninsula, San Francisco
Nov. 6, 2005
Saturday night we stayed at the Embassy Suites just south of the San Francisco Airport. It was a hopping place that night and it took us a long time to find a place to park as there were 3 wedding receptions going on at the hotel. We were a little hungry when we arrived and thought about crashing one of them and pretending to be Uncle and Aunt so and so but we decided against that. Sunday morning we had breakfast at the hotel then drove to the BART station which was just a few miles away.
The BART ride was nice. It stopped at the SF airport then went mostly underground nearly to the ocean then downtown SF. We got off at the Powell St. station and ascended to the shopping center at Powell and Market St. That is a very nice place with Nordstrom's etc. I was fascinated by the circular escalator in the center of the shopping mall, very intriguing. We bought tickets and waited for the cable car. The line was quite long but eventually 4 cable cars came down the hill and we got on. I got a prime spot on the cable car, standing on the running board on the front of the starboard side of the car. I shot 150 pictures or so but mercifully did not include all of them on the website. We went over the hill to Fisherman's Wharf and saw a bunch of nice neighborhoods and about a years worth of restaurants to explore. We walked around the wharf area, went to The Cannery, Ghirardelli Square, and had lunch at Sabella & La Torre's. That was a little place behind where they were boiling the crabs. We had planned to have a light snack but that didn't work out! Susan had a whole crab and I had calamari - both very good. We had planned to go to Chinatown too but that will have to wait until Friday. other things that looked interesting for Friday were a bike trip from the wharf up through the Presidio, over the Golden Gate bridge and back on the Sausalito Ferry, and a guided tour of the Fisherman's Wharf area on a Segway ( the little two wheeled electric cars that you stand on - see the pictures). After lunch we walked around some more and caught a trolley which took us around the Embarcadero to the BART Station. We got back to the car at 4:30 or so.
I had planned to bushwhack our way from SF airport to Monterey but since it was beginning to get dark we decided to follow the directions provided. We drove highway 101 through the middle of Silicon Valley and it was interesting to see all of the buildings with the names that are so familiar. However, there were more software companies than semiconductor companies, the names were Yahoo, Ebay, Sun, etc. The traffic was quite heavy all of the way and on the turnoff to Monterey there was a continuous line of cars leaving that area, I suppose they had been here for the weekend. We found our house with no problems and it is really nice. It is located on a street about a block from the "village" area of Pacific Grove. It looks very quaint but more about that after we explore.